Southern Xinjiang

Southern Xinjiang
ActiveRecorded as grown here since 2000
⛶
Location	China
Coordinates	38.90, 78.60
Country	China
Provinces/States	Xinjiang
Area	531,000 km²
Climate	Arid
Primary Mountains	Kunlun,Pamirs,Tian Shan
Growing history
Earlier names	Kashgaria; Altishar; Sinkiang; Chinese Turkistan; Eastern Turkestan
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Southern Xinjiang is the growing region of the oasis settlements on the western and southern edge of the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang, China. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Indian sources name its oases, Yarkand, Yengi Hissar, Kashgar and Khotan among them, as the places that produced the resin charas carried into British India by the Ladakh road; most of the charas of Chinese Turkistan reached India through Leh in Ladakh. Hermann Kreutzmann writes that high-quality Indian hemp came "from the oases in Southern Xinjiang".^: 78 The Chinese authorities prohibited the export in the mid-1930s, and by the early 1940s supplies to India had ceased.^: 82–83 Writing in 2015, the psychiatrists Hu Hongxing, Zhang Guanbai and Hao Wei placed the main producing counties of Xinjiang's cannabis smoking-mixture in the south. The growing region is drawn on four prefectures of Xinjiang: Kashgar, Hotan, Aksu and Kizilsu.

Geography

The Tian Shan crosses Xinjiang from east to west and divides it into southern Xinjiang (南疆, Nánjiāng) and northern Xinjiang. The south holds the Tarim Basin, with the Taklamakan Desert at its centre; the Kunlun closes Xinjiang on the south. Xinjiang has an arid climate, with little rain and high evaporation. The growing region takes in the western and southern rim of the basin, from the Pamir and Tian Shan foothills round Kashgar and Kizilsu, along the foot of the Kunlun through Hotan, to the northern edge at Aksu.

H. W. Bellew, a surgeon with the British embassy that went to Kashgar in 1873–74, called the settlements of the country oases in an arid desert. Their cultivation, he wrote, depended entirely on water drawn from the rivers and springs by canals, and their farmsteads spread from the towns to the edge of the desert. Hemp was among the crops of their fields, with wheat, barley, maize, rice, cotton and flax.^: 4–5

Historical names

The United Nations Secretariat wrote in 1953 of the province of Sinkiang, formerly known as Chinese Turkistan, and the report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission calls it Eastern Turkestan. Kreutzmann also uses the names Kashgaria and Altishar.^{: 78, 81}

Cultivation history

Before the 1860s

Hu, Zhang and Hao write that cannabis smoking reached Xinjiang from India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with mohe (莫合烟), a coarse tobacco of the crushed stems and leaves of Nicotiana rustica. In that period, in their account, the smoking-mixture máyān (麻烟) of Makit and of Shache (Yarkand) was the best known. Douglas Forsyth's mission was told in 1870 that hemp had been among the taxes paid at Yarkand under Chinese rule.^: 33

Under Yakub Beg, 1860s–1870s

Accounts written by British visitors under the rule of Yakub Beg differ on how the crop was treated. Douglas Forsyth, who led the British mission to Yarkand in 1870, reported that the resin was taken from hemp "grown on the borders of every field in Yarkund".^: 28 On the way to Yarkand the mission passed through fields of hemp at Sanju.^: 14 J. E. T. Aitchison, lately British Commissioner in Ladakh, wrote in 1874 that the ruler had prohibited growing the plant in regular fields, so that it was raised only in single rows round fields of other crops, to escape notice.^: 51–52 Bellew wrote that opium and hemp were "set under no restrictions" while alcohol was suppressed.^: 383 At Sanju, a settlement of about twelve hundred households, he listed among the crops "Hemp, for its resin, which is a staple export to India".^: 221–222

The Indian trade, 1880s–1930s

In a letter of 1881 the British Joint Commissioner in Ladakh named the places that produced the charas of the Ladakh road: Yarkand, Yengi Hissar, Kashgar and Khotan. He judged the charas of Yengi Hissar the best of Eastern Turkestan and wrote that it was often sent through Kokand to Bukhara and sold under the Bukhara name. Captain Ramsay, Joint Commissioner at Leh, reported in 1888 that charas was produced chiefly near Yarkand and that, since Russia had prohibited its cultivation in its own territories, supplies came almost entirely from Yarkand territory. Aitchison placed the finest charas at Karmak near Yangi Hissar, with more from Postgraum and Kurgilik (Kargilik); Kurgilik had the worst name for quality and adulteration.^: 52 Kreutzmann identifies Khan-Arik, between Yarkand and Kashgar, as a source of high-quality charas.^: 80

Kreutzmann reports that the end of charas cultivation in Yarkand was announced in 1909 and denied the following year.^: 82 The government of India's annual report for 1936 stated that the Chinese authorities had announced their intention to prohibit cultivation in Yarkand and export from it, and the report for the same year attributed the fall in contraband to a Chinese prohibition on growing the plant in Central Asia and on exporting charas. The report for 1944 said that illicit imports from Chinese Turkistan had stopped completely because production there was reported to have stopped. When the export ended is reported in three ways: the United Nations Secretariat concluded that the provincial government of Sinkiang prohibited it in 1934; Kreutzmann describes an export duty raised in 1936 and a proclamation by the head of the Kashgar administration in January 1936 that prohibited the sale and export of opium, charas and wine;^{: 80, 82–83} and I. C. and R. N. Chopra date the end of imports into India to about 1934–35.

After 1949

Zhou Limin writes that after 1949 cultivation and the making and smoking of máyān remained common in remote villages. From the mid-1960s to about the 1970s most growers grew it for themselves and their companions and very seldom sold it; from the late 1970s, in his account, máyān spread again, above all in southern Xinjiang. Hu, Zhang and Hao report large plantings in the 1950s and 1960s at Kashgar, Hotan, Makit, Yengisar, Maralbexi, Aksu, Toksu, Kuqa, Bügür and Korla, where the plant could be seen everywhere. An incomplete count in 1990 found more than 10,000 people growing cannabis in Xinjiang. In June 1997 the police of Toksu County uprooted 11,880 plants in a case of illegal cultivation.

The regional government prohibited the cultivation of cannabis by a notice of 1985. Its regulations of 1991, as amended in 1997, ordered cultivated plants to be eradicated compulsorily.

Since 2000

Hu, Zhang and Hao wrote in 2015 that Xinjiang remained the source of China's cannabis and that its máyān was produced mainly in the south, in the counties of Shache, Makit, Yengisar, Maralbexi, Kargilik, Yopurga, Guma, Kuqa and Bügür. Cannabis could also be grown in northern and eastern Xinjiang, in their account, but the máyān made there was much poorer. Zhou wrote in the same year that cannabis growing and the making and trafficking of máyān were frequent in Xinjiang, and that in recent years strict action against growing and making it there had led many people from Xinjiang to bring cannabis in from other provinces.

Cultivation and preparation

Aitchison recorded the Turki name kandir for the plant, an annual that grew to eight or ten feet and needed plenty of water, and nasha for the extract, the best of which came from the flower. Each farm produced little. The resin was made up in small balls, which middlemen collected from the farms; the inferior grades were packed in parcels and adulterated, chiefly with the mealy coat of the seed of Elaeagnus.^: 52

The Chopras wrote in 1957 that the highest yield and the best quality of charas came from plants grown in Yarkand, where the plant grew wild in quantity at 3,000 to 5,000 feet (900 to 1,500 m) and was also cultivated. The plants reached 8 to 10 feet (2.4 to 3 m) and were harvested for their flower heads in September and October. The dried heads were crushed by hand and sieved to a powder, which was kept in rawhide bags through the winter, warmed in the sun until the resin melted, and kneaded with wooden rods.

Trade

Main article: Charas

Bellew called "the hemp resin, or bang, of Yarkand" the principal export towards Kashmir and the Punjab.^: 7 On the road over the Sanju pass the embassy met caravans carrying charas from Yarkand towards Ladakh, one of them of Afghans from Bajaur with about sixteen horses.^{: 207, 217} Aitchison counted 9,134 maunds of charas, valued at Rs 4,32,368, brought into Leh from Yarkand over six years.^: 51 At Leh, Ramsay reported in 1888, the Yarkandi traders exchanged their charas with Indian traders for piece goods and other Indian goods.

The Punjab excise administration reported to the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in 1893 that about 4,000 maunds of charas, mostly from Yarkand, crossed the province's northern and western frontiers each year. Most of the Yarkand charas went through Leh to Sultanpur in Kulu; some went west through Kashmir.^{: 46, 48} The Commission wrote that charas was practically a foreign article in India, most of it brought from Yarkand through the Himalayan passes, and that it was the principal import from Yarkand.

Kreutzmann writes that Indian traders, whose communities and financiers came from Amritsar and Hoshiarpur in Punjab and some from Bajaur and Kashmir, exported the oases' cannabis to British India in several grades. From 1895 to 1939 silk yarn and charas were by far the two main exports from Xinjiang to British India.^: 78–80 The government of India at one time allowed 70,000 kg of charas to be imported each year.

Herbarium and seed collections

The mission of Paul Pelliot and Louis Vaillant collected the sheet Pelliot 121 (1906) at Kashgar. T. T. Trofimov collected Trofimov s.n., Hotan (1940) in sown fields in a village of the Khotan district and determined it as the wild variety, var. spontanea. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew holds an undated sample of seed from Yarkand, EBC 71830 (s.d.). J. M. McPartland and Ernest Small figure a specimen collected at Yarkand by Henderson in 1871 as their var. afghanica, a Central Asian domesticate grown for sieved hashish and sometimes for seed oil.^{: 92, 99}

Growing Areas

Growing Area	Province
Kashgar	Xinjiang
Khotan	Xinjiang
Yarkand	Xinjiang

Accessions

No accessions documented yet.

Recent news

No news items are recorded for this growing region yet.

See also

• Charas
• China
• Hashish
• Indian Hemp Drugs Commission
• Xinjiang